Choosing Keywords Wisely

For the past few weeks I’ve been talking about ranking on Google using YouTube videos. This is critical for your business because, according to Neil Patel, less than 25% of ALL websites are ever visited by ANYONE! Getting found for your chosen keywords is vital to your ability to do business online. One of the things I’ve talked about is to use your keywords in the title, description, tags, and even in your audio script. But how exactly do you select the keywords that you wish to rank for? That is the topic of today’s post.

Keywords are simply those words that are entered into a search engine. One of the best descriptions about how to use keywords that I’ve seen is by the Yoast SEO plugin, which you can read here.

For example, if you are looking for light bulbs, you would enter “light bulbs” into the search engine. Of course, that isn’t very descriptive, and you are going to get millions of results for something that generic. Ranking for a generic term like light bulbs is not only difficult, but expensive. and worse, the probability of someone buying a light bulb from you after searching on those words is highly unlikely. If we get a little more specific, like “LED light bulbs”, we are still going to get thousands of web sites returned to us, and again, it would be both difficult and expensive to rank for these words. The more descriptive you can be with your keywords, the more likely it is that someone will find your site and actually do business with you.

This is what is termed as long tail keywords. The good news is that long tail keywords comprise 70% of all searches performed online. So, if someone is searching for “Where can I buy long-lasting dimmable LED light bulbs for my kitchen in Parker, Colorado?” and you have a page on your website that specifically is optimized for long-lasting dimmable LED light bulbs for your kitchen, and you are located in Parker, CO, well, you will probably get found when that search is created, and that person will probably buy from you. When you create a YouTube video addressing those same keywords, and link that video back to that page on your website, you simply become the best answer on the internet for that person’s needs.

Of course, there are far fewer people asking that specific question, but for the ones that are, you are the solution. Long tail keywords contain a keyphrase (generally three or four words) highly specific to what you are selling. This helps you to find highly targeted customers looking to buy exactly what you’re selling. This makes long tail keywords immensely useful for PPC and SEO and they always outperform generic keywords in terms of conversion rates. In fact, long tail keywords convert 2.5 times more frequently than short tail keywords. Back to the question, how do you determine the best keywords to use? It used to be fairly simple to do this, as Google provided a free tool called Google Keyword Planner. Google still provides this tool, but you must have a Google AdWords account in order to use it. If you aren’t advertising with Google, this becomes a hassle just for looking up keywords. Worse, Google hides some of the data as they are trying to steer advertisers towards certain keywords in order to raise the bidding price. I get it, they are in business to make money, and advertising is the primary way they do this. but that doesn’t help small businesses looking to rank organically. If you do have an AdWords account, you can certainly use Google KWP, but you may want to supplement it with some other tools.

The biggest problem I’ve found with using alternatives to Google’s Keyword Planner is that most free tools will give you a list of related keywords, but they don’t give you important statistics like search volume, CPC (cost per click), and how competitive that term is. The tools that do provide this information cost a lot of money (anywhere form $99 per month to $999 per month, the average being about $250 per month just to get this information). that is a problem for most small businesses. Fortunately there are some ways to get the data you need to make informed decisions about what keywords to target.

These tend to use the google auto-suggest feature to generate the list of suggested keywords. Of these, I really like InstaKeywords for the data provided. And the one that you definitely want to add to your arsenal is a browser extension (add-on) called KeywordsEverywhere.com. Keywords Everywhere works on both Chrome and FireFox and gives you results in real-time when you perform a search and it gives you the critical data described above. The search volume, cpc and competition data shown by Keywords Everywhere comes directly from Google Keyword Planner. For example, if you are targeting “Discount Coupons” as your seed term, you go go Google and enter “Discount Coupons.” Here are the results:

Keywords Everywhere shows that the term “groupon” has over 11 million monthly searches. We can certainly rule that out as that is business-specific, as is “retailmenot.” But check out the third line: 56,000 monthly searches and a competition score of only 25%. That is one we can work with and possibly rank for, so it would make sense to do a video for “Coupon codes.” When you combine this with a local search like “Coupon Codes in Parker, CO” you can probably get ranked, and as we’ve seen above, have a high probably of conversion when someone does search for that.

Remember that once you have selected the keywords you are going to use, be sure to include these in your video title, description, tags, and script. Link your video back to a specific page on your website that also uses these keywords in the page title and written copy. You will soon be dominating the search results.

Did you find this article useful or learn anything? If so, I’d love some feedback about what you thought.

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